If the effect of the NVRA (Motor Voter) is to force a state to allow never-eligible non-citizens the opportunity to vote, he wrote, then the statute might violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, which guarantees that the right to vote cannot be denied by a dilution of the weight of a citizens vote.

As for the Voting Rights Act claim, Detzner wrote, Florida already received federal permission to remove noncitizens, which is clearly spelled out in Florida law.

Whats more, the Voting Rights Act applies to only five Florida counties  Monroe, Hillsborough, Collier, Hardee and Hendry  and not the other 62 in Florida, including Miami-Dade, where about 1,600 of the 2,700 potential noncitizens were initially identified by the state in a database created by the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.

About 500 people in Miami-Dade have been found to be lawful citizens and voters, and 13 noncitizens have been found. Two of them might have voted and could face prosecution. The county has been unable to verify the citizenship of more than 1,100 others.

Assuming the purge halts, those people could vote this year  even if some are noncitizens.

"Not a single eligible voter as far, as I know, has been removed from the voter rolls," Scott said Wednesday on WNDB radio in Daytona Beach, according to a News Service of Florida transcript. "Not one. And were working to keep it that way."

"Their vote should not be diluted by people who dont have the right to vote," Scott said. "We need to be reviewing our voter rolls and making sure only those individuals who have the right to vote are voting."

This hardly seems like an approach earnestly designed to protect the integrity of elections and to ensure that eligible voters have their votes counted, said the letter, written by Scotts hand-picked secretary of state, Ken Detzner, a fellow Republican.

Detzner also submitted a list of four questions that he wants the DOJ to answer: